If you watched any television over the weekend, you no doubt noticed once again the intense interest that the presidential campaigns have in Colorado voters. Not only did the barrage of political ads seem to hit a new record for frequency, it never once let up.

As this bombardment of advertising confirms, Colorado finds itself as not merely another swing state but perhaps the swing state. It all depends on how the candidates end up dividing the battleground states in the East and Midwest on Tuesday.

Indeed, Colorado is one of only two states in the West (the other being Nevada) where polls show both candidates still with a decent shot at victory. And Colorado is the only one in which the race appears essentially a dead heat.

With so much focus on the state and the likelihood that the vote will be extremely close, it’s important that Colorado rise to the occasion and deliver its verdict to the nation as soon as possible.

It would be an embarrassment, in short, if the nation woke up Wednesday morning to discover that the election was still in doubt thanks to the slow pace of ballot-counting in Colorado.

We mention this because of a report in Monday’s Denver Post by Allison Sherry and Ryan Parker revealing that county clerks do not all share the same commitment to getting the ballots counted overnight.

As Sherry and Parker report, “Many clerks — such as Arapahoe County’s Nancy Doty and El Paso County’s Wayne Williams — have contingency plans to staff shifts all night until ballots are counted.” However (and this is where we get worried), “some clerks — Adams County’s Karen Long and Larimer County’s Scott Doyle among them — plan on sending employees home around midnight and picking up early Wednesday, even if it’s close and the country is watching Colorado.”

No one is asking him to kill his judges. However, the drama of Colorado’s critical role in this election has hardly been a secret, either. If many clerks were able to plan and organize their offices in order to keep counting ballots into the wee hours, why can’t all of them?

We realize that in the grand scheme of things, making the world wait while a few county clerks and their troops get some well-deserved rest will not change the course of history. But it hardly seems too much to ask that once every four years they brace themselves for an all-night affair.